Category Archives: politics

bad day, phones, politics

Bad Hair(less) Day

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Today has been one of those days. You know the type. Things go wrong and nothing works like it should and you aren’t quite thinking straight.

It started this morning with the phone service for the Animal Officers missing (all of their phones being unreachable with the dreaded “You do not exist!” message from the cellular carrier).  That left all the calls routing to me with no way to get the officers to respond. Finally got that sorted out by 1pm when the cellular carrier finally fessed up to screwing it up. You never want to hear the words “Oh, we changed all our internal coding last night and forgot to handle your subset.” Getting everyone to pull the batteries out of their handsets and then pull their sim cards for long enough to reset and putting it all back together again was interesting. It seems that many good animal people are a bit technology challenged and can’t figure out how to open their phones without detailed instruction. Which is hard to do when their phones aren’t working. Thank heavens for internet connectivity and email and laptop video.

The day of snafus left me a bit discombobulated (and of course well behind schedule on all the things I had planned to get done). It was in the upper 60s and glorious outside and I didn’t get to enjoy it. Then, as I was making supper, I found myself opening the microwave to get a fork and putting a dish of food in the silverware drawer to heat it up. Needless to say, that was untenable. But I did finally get the meal made and it was edible, so I couldn’t have made too many really bad errors during preparation.

I’ll leave you with this succinct view of the current idiocy occurring in congress:

answers, caucus, politics

In Answer To …

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In answer to the question about yesterdays post – I am a Republican. It is in some senses a requirement here.  28.4% of the registered voters are Democrats, 70.4% are Republican and the remainder are split amidst the various other groups. Most rural agrarian communities like this county are strongly Republican with a smattering of Democrats. Most of the voters are like me and do not vote along party lines, but for the best candidate for the job. The office I am running for is currently held by a Democrat who is term limited. In many respects, running for county commissioner is like running for a non-partisan office. The process of getting on the ballot is different, but the party ideologies are not the focus, local issues are.

Tonight’s precinct caucus was interesting if for no other reason than the fact most offices have at least two or more candidates on the Republican side. The national and state senatorial and representative races seem to have  pulled a full scale onslaught of ideologues of all bents. The real problem is that many of them have forgotten the true test of reality – facts. Makes for interesting political speeches, but really inane debates. Likewise, there is an active pursuit of the governorship with a bit less of a loss of sight of facts.

All told, the caucus for the precinct I live in took slightly more than an hour. It would have taken less than an hour, but some of the standard speeches had to be made by party loyalists not running for office. We started by electing the precinct officers for the coming year. Then there was a straw poll for the gubernatorial candidates and the senatorial candidates, and after that it was all in selecting who the representatives to county assembly would be. Our precinct was apportioned 14 seats and we had 16 attendees, it could have been a race. Fortunately, one pair of attendees planned to be out of town, so the remainder were named as delegates to the county assembly. We then spent a little time drafting those not in attendance to be our 14 alternates. We also had to choose our dedicated delegate to the state assembly. Only three people were interested, so we elected one and named the other two as candidates for the at-large representation from the county. That was it for the official business.

In the tradition of all good precinct meetings, a couple of jokes had to be told at the start of the meeting. Although a bit stale, this warhorse was the winner:

Remember back when Ronald Reagan was President? We also had Bob Hope and Johnny Cash with us.

Now we have Obama as President and no hope and no cash!!

Time to get back to reality. I’ll leave with this to appease all the Democrats that read this blog:

drear, misc, politics

Manic Monday

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A dreary day today, especially as L departed back to the mountains this morning. Not only is Molly dog laying around looking like the world has ended, it was drear and overcast until this afternoon when the sun peaked out. I love the oddity of the weather at this time of year. Saturday was warm (60’s) and sunny, Sunday was overcast and cool (30’s). Forecast is for Thursday to hit 70 followed by snow and cold on Friday. Must be March in Colorado.

Tomorrow is precinct caucus day here. That assures entertainment for the evening as I attend my local precinct caucus meeting. The caucii (which sounds better that caucuses even if wrong) don’t have a huge impact on local office seekers like me. The caucuses feed into the county caucus which does little beyond determining ballot listing order for the primary ballot for local offices. So all the effort and dirty work and fund raising and … come up in June and July. Looks to be fun.

(For those who don’t remember, I threw my hat into the ring for the office of county commissioner a while back. It is my first foray into partisan politics. Non-partisan political offices like mayor just require the signature of 50 voters and then waiting for the election. It’s a bit different once the donkey and elephant get involved.)

Back to preparing documents for a Thursday meeting related to construction of our new facility (for my day job as executive director of the humane society). I’ll leave you with a quip I heard on during a conference call today:

Friendship is like peeing on yourself: everyone can see it, but only you get the warm feeling that it brings.

Can you tell I’ve been talking to construction contractors?

politics, talk

The S in Sucker

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Ever had one of those days that puts the s in sucker? Today was one of those days for me.

It was beautiful outside, 72 degrees and calm. (And still no real winter here.) The forecast for the next few days is warm but extremely windy. So today was the day to be outside and catching some early spring rays. Unfortunately, it just didn’t work out that way. Everybody in creation wanted to talk to me today. My first call came in at 8am and the last after 8pm. Everything from meetings to planning to important to bitching to just wanting to blither on. So Molly and I did not get to enjoy the warmth and sun together. (Molly at least got a nice nap laying in the backyard in the sun – I really wanted to join her.) At least it was a good celebration of Dr. Seuss’ birthday.

I’ve always wondered in the back of my mind if political office isn’t something more compatible with the female temperament than the male one (in a politically incorrect generaliztion). It seems that it can eat me alive when I am pelted with problem after problem and there isn’t a thing I can do about them. Somehow the talk and talk until we all feel better method so popular amidst the women of my acquaintance just doesn’t work for guys like me. When guys hear a problem, we want to fix it deep down in our guts. Many times the person with the problem doesn’t actually want us to fix the problem or realizes that we can not fix it. They just want someone to listen and say “yes” and “I see” at the appropriate places. That can be very hard to do in a marriage and is even harder in politics. It is hard to shed that inner turmoil demanding that you fix the problem and then just let it go.

Sometimes you just want to scream and then put your head in the sand. That doesn’t seem like it would help much, but it certainly sounds attractive on a day like today. Oh well, hopefully tomorrow will be better.



election, politics, president

We Have a Winner

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I just saw that McCain has conceded to Obama and they are awaiting Obama’s speech. I can’t say that I am surprised – I felt that Obama expressed a vision (and had the better oratorical skills) whereas McCain merely reacted. People in crisis are always more in favor of visionaries than those who merely react.

One thing I liked was that McCain’s concession speech was classy, complementary, and heartfelt. It was one of the best speeches I have ever heard him make. I hope that Obama and McCain can work well with each other in the coming years. It might help heal some rifts.

Obama’s victory speech reminded me a bit of some of Martin Luther King’s speeches. It wasn’t his best speech, but it was a good speech none the less. The problem with victory speeches is that you have to thank so many people – the loser doesn’t have quite the same onus to thank the troops.

And best of all? The blasted telephone calls  and negative tv ads will stop!